I
have been growing alpines (rock garden plants), and other related plants
since 1970, and over the years have bought thousands of plants; mainly
from mail order specialist nurseries, as well as personal visits to
those nurseries. I have bought plants from Alpine Garden Society plant
stalls, and have been given plants by friends and other alpine plant
enthusiasts. I have grown many from seed, collected from remote and
wild mountain regions in many parts of the world, sometimes by donating
in a share of various plant hunting expeditions where I have often received
seeds of plant species new to cultivation.
I have had great success and enjoyment with the majority of these plants
I have acquired, but I have also had the inevitable losses and failures,
and testament to this is a large glass jar filled with ‘dead labels’;
which I keep on a top shelf in the garage, in the optimistic hope that
I may be able to place some of them next to a new plant; and try again!

I
have bought very few plants from local garden centres or DIY gardening
sections, as the choices that are available in these are very limited,
and are just the “tip of the iceberg”. They usually offer
just the standard, easy, more common plants, and whilst many of these
are certainly worthy of a place in any rock garden or stone trough,
you will have to seek out some of the specialist alpine plant nurseries
to obtain some of the more elusive and rarer gems. But having said that,
and at the risk of sounding contradictory, there have been the few occasions
when I have called in at a garden centre for plant labels or potting
grit, and have been pleasantly surprised by unexpectedly coming across
an alpine gem amongst the hotchpotch of common every-day rock plants.
This doesn’t happen very often, but is most rewarding when it
does.
Many of the plants that I grow or have grown, have been recorded on
35mm slides using firstly a Pentax ME Super SLR camera and then later
with a Minolta Dynax 3xi SLR camera; and whilst it is nice to view these
pictures projected onto a 2 meter wide screen, there is quite a lot
of hassle involved in setting things up to view the slides. I have therefore
had very many of the better slides copied onto disc, so that they can
be easily viewed on my TV and computer. I have also dispensed with taking
any more pictures on 35mm slides and have now updated to a digital SLR
camera.
I thought it might be nice if I could share some of these pictures with
others; hence the development and launch of this website – I do
hope you get some enjoyment from it, and find the contents interesting
and informative. All the plant photographs shown on these pages, (unless
otherwise stated) are of plants grown in the open in my own garden over
the past 40 + years.

Many of the pictures
in the 'Portraits of Alpine Plants'
page have a ‘mouse-over’ function where you can view a close-up
or different view of the plant by moving the mouse cursor over the picture8.
As you can with the two pictures shown
below.

The website will be continually
updated with newer pictures when they become available, so do please
look here often.

I
do hope you find much of interest in these pages, and should
you wish to comment on any relevant subject, or just share you
experience in growing alpine plants or ask a question, I welcome
you!
You can contact me by using the form below. You will have to include
the verification number as shown; this is to help prevent spam bots filling
up my in-box with unwelcome rubbish!